Biden, push the voting bills now
WASHINGTON — It’s time to make it all about democracy.
It’s time for President Joe Biden to embrace what he put front-and-center when announcing his candidacy in April 2019: that “the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”
Biden hoped then that by defeating Donald Trump, it would be enough to end the danger.
It hasn’t.
It’s not just that the 2020 election was closer than Biden had hoped. The results also helped Republicans win enough seats in the House and Senate to turn the enactment of Biden’s agenda into a nightmarish procedural minefield.
Worse, Trump refused to accept defeat, and his campaign against democracy has continued full force. A substantial majority of those who call themselves Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen. The widespread acceptance of this lie has bred a shameful timidity among Republican politicians who know better. Those who speak out forcefully for democracy and the rule of law — see Reps. Liz Cheney, R-wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-ill. — are ostracized.
Trump’s mendacity has created the rationale for democracy-wrecking measures in state after state while emboldening a movement to intimidate nonpartisan election officials into resigning so they can be replaced by those who embrace his falsehoods.
Democrats, by contrast, seem to be moving in many different directions at once. Some focus primarily on enacting as much of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda as they can. Others want to emphasize the imperative of protecting democracy by passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
In the meantime, the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack, led by Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-miss., and Cheney, has — to its credit — spent the last few days offering an abundance of evidence reminding the country that Trump and his supporters in Congress were trying to stage a coup. They really and truly were trying to void the results of a free election. The violence on Capitol Hill was part of this effort.
Here’s the problem: There is, currently, no through line, no overarching rationale, for these disparate Democratic endeavors. The investigation of Trump and the campaign for voting rights seem disconnected from Biden’s social initiatives. As for the latter, deadlines keep slipping, their purpose lost in a miasma of competing (big) numbers and uncertainties about which parts of a House-passed bill the Senate might endorse.
Yes, everything would be easier if Sens. Joe Manchin III, D-W.VA., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-ariz., were willing to move quickly to make a deal. The sooner that happens, the better.
But angry public scoldings have not had much effect on the two holdouts, and Biden’s private entreaties to Manchin last week seem to have done little to break the impasse. When Biden was asked on Wednesday how much progress he was making on his program before he left for Kentucky to comfort survivors of deadly tornadoes, the president replied with one less-than-full-hearted word: “Some.”
What’s missing in Washington is a sense of urgency. The best case for that urgency rests on the imperative to defend democracy. Biden must stop downplaying the pro-democracy bills while waiting for passage of his social program. The truth is: We’ve waited too long for both.
And at the moment, there appears to be more room for hope on the voting legislation. A group of senators who have in the past shared Manchin’s reluctance to change the filibuster rules have been working closely with him to find a way to alter them enough to get the democracy bills — bills that both he and Sinema support — to Biden’s desk.
A victory for the voting reforms would electrify Biden’s currently dispirited supporters. And a bold defense of democracy is exactly the right response both to the findings of the Jan. 6 committee so far and to the attacks on free elections in the states.
Building on voting rights victories, Biden would be in a stronger position to argue that passing the rest of his program is part of an effort “to prove that democracy still works,” as he put it last April, by easing the day-to-day burdens on our citizens. Surely Manchin and Sinema cannot want Biden’s efforts to collapse in a heap. That would only open a wide path for a resurgence of Trumpist Republicanism, the main threat to our democracy now.
“Democracies don’t die all at once,” Sen. Raphael G. Warnock, D-GA., told MSNBC’S Rachel Maddow on Tuesday night. “It’s a little bit at a time.”
Precisely because the dangers to democracy often don’t become obvious to everyone until it’s too late, Biden needs to make raising the alarm his priority. “We are in a battle for the soul of this nation,” he said in 2019. We still are.